It’s almost 2 weeks since I started an experiment on jimsmarketingblog.com. I wanted to see what REALLY happens when a blog offers a valuable, ‘do-follow link’ to everyone who comments there.
What does ‘do-follow’ mean?
In brief, every time you comment on my blog, you will receive a special kind of link back to your website or blog. This link actually tells Google and Co to visit your website or blog – which can really help your Search Engine Optimisation.
Sadly, the vast majority of blogs (over 99% apparently), offer ‘no-follow links’; which tell Google and Co NOT to follow the link to your website or blog. They do this to stop the mighty Google penalising them with a lower page rank and also to stop spammers targeting their blogs. Links from do-follow blogs like mine are a lot more valuable, so spammers apparently target them more (or do they? – Read on!)
Here’s what’s happened thus far!
Comment numbers are about the same
This surprised me. The percentage of people commenting here is, surprisingly, no higher than it was BEFORE I gave do-follow links! The original post, where I announced I was offering do-follow links, has now had well over 200 comments. However, the number of comments on my posts since then, have only grown at the same rate as my readership.
Links have doubled in 12 days
There has been one amazing, immediate improvement, since offering do-follow links! You can call it the power of attraction, karma, sewing and reaping – but the number of people linking to this blog has literally doubled in just 12 days!
No increase in Spam
Another surprise is that I have not seen any increase in the amount of spam I get, not yet anyway. I am getting the odd idiot try to use the comments section of various posts, to advertise their latest wonder product – but that’s nothing to do with the do-follow links – that’s just what some misguided people do on any well read blog. These are deleted immediately. Everything else has been caught by my spam filter. I use the Akismet plugin for WordPress.
Google isn’t happy with me
Google traffic here had been increasing until I started offering do-follow links. Now, it has stopped increasing and has actually dropped slightly. That said, all search engine traffic combined accounts for less than 1% of the people who come here.
In case you were wondering, the 4 biggest sources of people to this blog are:
1. Direct traffic
2. Twitter
3. StumbleUpon
4. Links from other blogs and websites
Conclusion
It’s still very early days, but I have seen nothing to stop me offering do-follow links. The readership is growing extremely well and I have attracted over a thousand new links; since offering do-follow links to my readers.
The lesson thus far, has been that the Internet is actually about PEOPLE and not about Google or any other company! If people like your website or blog, and you market it correctly, they are going to share it with their friends and contacts. If the people at Google are as smart as I think they are, they will catch onto this and stop trying to punish blogs that, like mine, are committed to helping others.
So, the experiment continues!
What do you think?
If you have any ideas or opinions regarding what I am doing I would love to know!
Equally, what have YOUR experiences been with linking, Google or blogging in general – share them with my readers and myself in the comments section.
If you are a Twitter user, please leave your user name in your comment, so people can follow you – I’m @jimconnolly by the way!
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I’ve been reading a lot about this lately and it seems it’s been working well for lots of bloggers. Well done.
I am wondering if perhaps I am getting BETTER traffic. Maybe people that follow links like yours are more prone to pay their authors (bloggers) with ad investigation and remarks and checking out the sites more, digging or saving links????
Just a thought that occurs. I know I get some google traffic but I am not sure how many actually stay around long enough to comment on articles. Tracking is out of my control on ehow.
I would like to experimient sometime after I reach my next moentary plateau. ALRADY
Have you looked at the new incoming links and the anchor text they use? I know there are sites that list blogs with DoFollow policies but that probably wouldn’t account for all of them.
It would be interesting to know what the increased links are targeting on your blog.
I HUG my Twitter! I heard that Twitter is going to take over Google…..now, where did I hear that from? Regardless, although I am not blacklisted, I pissed off the Almighty Google too – by not updating removed blog links in my robots.txt >,<